Painting in the Attic
by Iona Nineve
Summary: Jo comes over to help the Morgan boys clean out their attic, looking forward to the interesting things she might find. She gets a little more interest than she bargained for, centering around a book and a painting. Rated T for paranoia's sake.


**Disclaimer: I still don't own Forever, and I can't afford to make anyone an offer for it either.**

 **AN: This fic exploded a bit from its original concept, but Abe didn't insert himself as much as usual so that helped a bit. Anyway hope you enjoy, and feel free to review.**

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"Hi, Henry. I'm here to help." Jo greeted as Henry opened the door. He hadn't actually asked for her help, ever reluctant to request aid on anything, it had been Abe. So she had come over to help the two clean out the attic. She was wearing an old tee shirt and a pair of sweatpants. Coming in she gave Henry a bemused look over, no usual three-piece suit, in shocking contrast to his normal dress he wore an old and worn pair of slacks and his shirt sleeves were rolled up past his elbows and it was unbuttoned enough to expose some of his chest, the scar over his heart still hidden. "I didn't know you could look this casual, Henry."

He smiled wider with a little laugh. "Cleaning the attic is hardly an occasion. How did you- Abe?"

"Yeah. You could've asked, you know."

"I didn't want to bother you with something so boring as this."

"I truly can't even imagine what interesting things would come from an exploration of Henry Morgan's attic. Wouldn't miss it for the world."

"Jo, you made it!" Abe exclaimed, appearing from the second floor.

"It seems you are a very convincing recruiter, Abe."

"Well, now we're all here let's get to it." Henry paused in following his son back upstairs to share a roll of his eyes with Jo. She laughed quietly, joining him up the steps. When they reached the living room they found Abe standing with a cross expression and holding up a book. "Seriously, Henry?"

The book was _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ , by Oscar Wilde. "What? It was light reading last night."

"Come on, you know what I'm going to say."

"It wasn't that… I was simply revisiting an old acquaintance through literature." Henry said, his tone somewhat on the defensive side.

Jo was going to ask exactly what they were talking about, obviously a recurring conversation- whatever it was- but got sidetracked. "You knew Oscar Wilde?"

"Yes. He was… a most unique character."

"That attic isn't gonna clean itself, if we just stand here. Come on." Abe tossed the book back onto the side table and continued toward the opening to the attic, the others in toe.

"So were you like the inspiration for the book?"

"Not entirely. At the time I had returned to London after a long hiatus. I found myself among a rather artististic crowd, not for first time nor the last."

"Let me guess, you're last name was Gray."

"No, I was under the guise of my own son incase anyone was still around who would recognize me, Dorian Morgan."

"Dorian. Where did you get that name?"

"It was my father's middle name. My precaution came in handy, one of the older members of the club, a painter I believe, marveled at the uncanny resemblance to "my father". Another, a poet of mediocre skill, suggested that I was in fact the same person, unchanged by some act of will."

"I always wondered why he didn't flee at the very suggestion, being that the slightest thing tends to send him flying off to a distant country." Abe added from under the now open hatch.

"No one takes seriously the fanciful suggestion of a poet. Though I did consider it. But the idea I suppose latched in Oscar's mind. The other aspects of the novel came from his own philosophy and the companionship of his young lover, John Gray."

"OK, Henry all yours." Abe said nodding upward toward the attic. Henry advanced but was stopped.

"Oh no you don't. I get first honors on this one." Jo said commandingly, she wasn't going let him hide anything before she got up there.

"By all means, Detective." He allowed with a gesture of his hand, and she hoisted herself up into the hole from the stool under it.

"Where's the light?"

"Take a step forward." Henry called up.

She did so and let out an uncharacteristic small shriek when something hit her face. Batting at the unknown thing dangling into her face, she realized it was a cord, when she tugged on it a single lightbulb lit up above her. "Not funny, Henry!"

On the level below Henry grinned widely, entirely unrepentant, safely out of the detective's sight.

"So Pops when are you finally gonna admit you like Jo in the romantic sense?"

"Abraham!" Henry hissed in his best paternally warning tone.

Jo, not hearing the short conversation from below, was looking around at the collection of dusty items packed in the space. Most of them were draped with protective cloth but occasionally an ornate corner stuck out from its covering. "Wow." She breathed, wondering the story of each item, somehow guessing that this was more than storage of random stock- that all these things had at one time adorned one of Henry's residences through the decades. "When was the last time anyone was up here?"

"I put some things up there a few years ago." Henry answered.

She blew off the thick layer of dust that had accumulated on the bulb, brightening its glow throughout the room."When was it last cleaned out?"

"That would be about twenty-nine years ago." Abe supplied.

"Do I have permission to ascend, Detective?" Henry asked.

"Yes, Doctor Morgan, you may." Stepping onto the stool he took hold of either edge of the opening and swung himself up to sit on the dusty floor, legs dangling down from the opening. "Show-off." Jo accused.

A crooked smile appeared on his face. "A trick I learned getting up into lofts."

"Like haylofts? What was someone like you doing there?"

"Someone like me?" He asked, half-mocking offense.

"Yeah. A rich, city boy."

"I haven't always lived in the city. I didn't really even grow up there, the area was the outskirts of the city then. Our spring house had a little loft, I used to read up there during the summer." Henry said as he stood up, brushing dust off himself. "Then in the nineteenth century I was out in the West on and off, I became a farm doctor." He surveyed the mountain range of sheets as though he was trying to remember what lay beneath each covered hillock.

"What all's up here?"

"Mostly old stuff of mine, some too personal to sell, some I wouldn't let Abe sell."

"And we're cleaning it out?"

"Well that was thirty years ago. Let's say I'm a bit more stable now."

They made quick work of the more recent layers, passing antiques down the hatch to Abe. The excess stock removed, the work slowed as the pieces became larger, more interesting, and far dustier. "What's that?" Jo asked of the piece sitting on a table that Henry had just uncovered and which he was inspecting.

"A traveling desk."

"I can see that. What is it to you?"

"It belonged to my father. He'd take it with him when he went away for business dealings. This desk traveled the Atlantic more times in the twenty years he owned it than I have in my entire life."

"That sounds like an achievement."

"It is."

"How did you get hold of it?"

"A branch of the Morgan family, descended from my younger brother, fell into bankruptcy in the late 1860's, due to heavy stock holdings in Southern cotton. I purchased the desk at the estate sale."

"Wow. Is that how you got all this stuff?"

"Those pieces that belonged to my family, yes. The rest is just what I've accumulated over the years."

The sound of someone clearing their throat loudly came from below.

"I think it best we continue, Detective." Henry suggested, in response to his son's prompting. He passed the box like wooden desk to Jo, who carried it over to the opening and lowered it down to Abe. She was about say something to him but he held up a silencing hand (something he surely picked up from Henry) moving a finger to his lips and winked. She watched as he placed the desk in a place separate from where he'd placed the pieces that would be put in the shop.

She returned to the filing through the pieces, occasionally stopping in the sorting to ask the story behind pieces. More pieces were added to the store's stock but even more were kept, each destination identified by Henry.

"Henry, I'm not gonna find a hideously aged painting of you somewhere up here am I?" Jo asked, jokingly, from one side of the attic. The earlier talk of The Picture of Dorian Gray recurring to her mind.

"No you shall not, I assure you. If my affliction could so easily be solved by simply destroying a portrait, I would have escaped this curse long ago."

"Henry!" Abe scolded from the lower floor, as always displeased about his father's death seeking confessions.

Henry sighed, "I'm sorry, I didn't mean that." He said then turned to inspect the nearest antique with a little too much interest. Jo spared him a concerned glance, regretting her comment, before likewise returning to the antiques. A moment of somewhat awkward silence followed. "Detective, would you help me with this?" He asked from behind a chest of drawers which was being inched toward the opening to the floor below.

"Yeah sure." Once they got the chest to the edge, Henry descended to help lower it from underneath. The piece of furniture safely on the ground Henry took the chance to help Abe move some of the pieces into the shop. As he returned, Jo popped her head down from the hatch in the ceiling. "Hey, Henry, I thought you said I wouldn't find a portrait of you up here."

"You won't." Henry confirmed, very confused.

"Then what's this thing covered in a really fancy blanket, that's shaped suspiciously like a painting?" She didn't remember much about the book but she recalled a similar concealment had been applied to the gruesome cursed painting.

Henry climbed back into the attic to investigate the situation. "Now Jo, what are you ta- Oh, that." He said as his gaze met the ornately embroidered curtain of rich burgundy that covered a rectangular object.

"Yeah, that. What is it?"

"It's nothing." He tried, shrugging, knowing this would not suffice for the detective.

"Alright, so you won't mind if I look?"

He breathed in, preparing to speak, but she went ahead regardless and with care pulled the covering off. What was uncovered did turn out to be a portrait, but not quite what she had expected. The painting was of a family four children and their parents in simple but fine surroundings.

"Who are they?"

He paused a second before answering, "My family."

"Which is you?" Jo asked interestedly as she scanned the four children.

Pointing to the young boy on the far right, Henry responded. "That one."

"How cute. Why do you have it hidden up here? It's not like it will give away your secret."

"At the time I had just lost half of the family I had had for forty years, the last thing I wanted was a reminder of the family I had already lost."

"We should take it down, then."

His response was interrupted by Abe's call. "Lunch is ready."

"We'll be down in a moment." He gestured toward the opening, "Ladies first." And in his ever gentlemanly fashion helped her down, without much complaint from her for over-chivalry.

When they came to the table where three plates were already set out with a few platters of food, Henry excused himself to wash up, offering the same opportunity to her. "I'm fine." As Henry left, Abe came out the the kitchen again with the last platter. "You mean there wasn't enough food already?"

"There's never enough food." He replied.

Before she comment on anything else, she recalled Abe's earlier scene regarding the book found in the sitting room. "So what was all that earlier about Henry reading _The Picture of Dorian Gray_?"

"I'm against it. Whenever he reads it, he gets down on himself and about his "condition". Usually it's all I can do to keep him out of that dungeon of his."

"Why's that?"

"Have you ever read the book?"

"In high school, don't remember much."

"It's about this guy who gains eternal youth and he takes advantage of the lack of effect that the sins he commits have on his body. In short, his condition corrupts him, the corruption of his soul shown on the painting." He paused, giving her a moment to consider this much. "Reading it seems to incite Henry's fear that he will fall to the same corruption over time. He's been sensitive of the subject since the whole Adam fiasco."

"He can't actually think he'll turn into such an immoral monster as Dorian Gray or Adam."

"Can't I?" She turned around at the sound of his voice to find Henry standing in the doorway. "Adam himself said that he was a decent man 2,000 years ago. Who are any of us to say what I might become in that time?"

"And you see why I discourage him reading the book." Abe said waving an identifying hand at Henry's position.

Jo nodded. "You're more than just a decent man, Henry Morgan, you're a good man, one of the best I know." A doubtful huff came as Henry's answer. "It isn't possible, no matter how many years or centuries pass, for you to become like him."

"Time alone has already changed me." Abe rolled his eyes heavenward in complete exasperation. He allowed Jo to continue control of the argument with Henry, trying to reason with his father was a pastime he was growing rather tired of.

"Of course it has," she reasoned, not seeing Abe's pained, defeated expression as she unknowingly agreed with Henry's most common rebuttal to his arguments. "Time and life events change everyone, I'm not the same person I was as a kid, I grew up. It's no different for you, your mind still evolves even if your body doesn't."

"And what if I don't where that evolution is taking me? What if I can't stop myself from becoming like Adam, as the centuries go by?" She and Abe could both see his whirling descent into emotional frenzy with every word. "It took less than 160 years for me to bend near the point of breaking my oath as a physician, and only 60 more to break it utterly by taking a life, and-"

"Henry stop!" She ordered firmly, taking hold of his shoulders and shaking him. "Stop torturing yourself!" He didn't meet her eye, staring intently into her right ear. "You're not destined to turn out like Adam, he abandoned humanity and his own, you've devoted your entire life to helping people. You're a good man, not even time can change that if you don't let it."

Henry nodded silently, forcing himself to look her in the eye. What she saw in them told her that she had only half convinced him, but it was enough that he was willing to give in to her argument for now.

"Well I must say, I'm glad you listen to her, pops, cuz you don't listen to me." Abe said happy some achievement had been made. "No more Wilde novels?" He asked, in an expectant tone he rarely had the occasion to turn on his father.

"He only wrote the one."

"I know. I'm allowing you the plays."

"No more." Henry said, heading back out to the sitting room. When he returned it was with the offending copy of _The Picture of Dorian Gray_ in hand. He pressed it into Jo's hands. "Take it."

"What's this about?" She asked, somewhat confused.

"Call it removing the temptation, I suppose I've become a glutton for punishment. Sell it. It should fetch a good price; it's a first edition copy, autographed too."

"Henry, I couldn't. Why don't you sell it in the shop?"

"Books sell slowly in the shop."

"That they do," Abe added nodding in unhappy agreement, "and we've barely got room on the shelves as it is."

A silence fell over the trio a moment as Jo put the book carefully into her purse. "Lunch? We don't want all Abe's work to go cold." She prompted, sitting down at the table.

"Yes, of course." Henry responded as both he and Abe took their seats.

She reached to the nearest dish, to begin filling her plate."So, you knew Oscar Wilde. I always preferred Doyle myself."

"I imagine you would, Detective." He said, a laugh in his voice and the crooked grin returned to his face. "I knew him as well, met as doctors during the Boer War."

"Let me guess…"

"No, I didn't inspire Holmes," he interrupted waving a filled fork toward her, "that was all Bell."


End file.
